OH! OKAY. That's really interesting. I didn't realize that clicking the number allowed you to view the grid. That is actually a very neato feature.

...

Now I've just checked the grid page and I have one other question:

you click to, say, the sixth page in an album. you click on a photo. now clicking on the number to take you back to the grid, it takes you to the first page of the album. Is there a way to have it take you back to the sixth page?

I didn't notice my pages taking more time to load when viewing galleries... in fact, it was a decrease in the number of thumbnails and losing other navigation in the last few updates that caused me problems. I think we need MORE thumbnails on a page for navigation inside a gallery, not none.

When we first lost the ability to navigate to different pages in a gallery (numbers were listed under the thumbnail display instead of just next/last) it affected gallery views. Then the number of thumbnails decreased, and people stopped bothering to navigate more than a few pages in, and posting a gallery with more than a dozen images in it became a completely waste of time.

Hiding the other images in the gallery might make clicking through images one at a time faster, but people don't want to click ahead when they don't know if there's anything else they want to see ahead. Making people leave the gallery view to go back and forth to the grid view to find other images is adding unnecessary steps to get to content. The more steps you put between people and getting to where they want to go, the higher the bounce rate is going to be.